A Lesson in Linguistics
by StoryWeaver56
Summary: Trip just can't figure out how to install some strange new warp coils they obtained from an alien species-and the instructions are in an alien language! Can Hoshi help him out?


_Alright, I would like to say although I am not a linguist I AM a linguistics undergrad, so I do know a bit about the topic. I might not get everything perfect, so if you are a linguist, please understand. If you aren't a linguist and are interested in what Hoshi does, here's a short little story that I made sure won't feel like a hard-core lesson, but will be informative while keeping true to _Star Trek: Enterprise _and giving you a little something interesting and fun to read. Hope you enjoy!_

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"_**A Lesson in Linguistics"**_

Commander Trip Tucker stared at the large container of warp coils at his feet, brow wrinkled in confusion. He stretched out his sore back from the hunched position he had been kneeling in for the past twenty minutes. Never did he think trying to install new warp coils into the nacelles would be so frustrating for him. He was the chief engineer, for crying out loud!

Tucker knelt down on the hard deck plating of the _Enterprise-NX_'s main engineering deck. The unusually empty sound of the room and the lack of reverberation beneath his feet only made Trip more aware of the fact that he _still _didn't have warp drive working. And all because of some annoyingly confusing warp coils. _Why the hell would someone design these like this? _he thought for the thousandth time. _I just don't get it!_

Well, since no one else on his engineering team could figure it out, he might as well pull out the big guns. Trip grabbed the PADD that was lying by the container and accessed the instructions. He grumbled beneath his breath at the thought of him actually having to use instructions to install new warp coils, but there was no helping it. Time was flying by and he still didn't have the coils installed, much less warp drive up and running. Captain Archer knew installing new warp coils was going to take a couple days, and he was going to be angry if Trip didn't start doing something productive soon.

Once he accessed the instructions, Trip groaned out loud. _Why? _he asked the fates. _Why does this have to be so complicated? _The instructions were in Kellarian, the language of the primary source of the warp coils. Usually he would route the instructions to Ensign Hoshi Sato's console on the bridge and she would work it out in a heartbeat, sending him the translation. But he knew the _Enterprise _had been desperate after their last conflict had overloaded their old warp coils and theyhad needed new ones soon before they could get some new, refreshingly Starfleet-issued coils. The _Enterprise_ had gotten the new coils from a group of merchant Frinoshians, a species that had no idea how to even pronounce "Kellarian" much less speak their language. The Frinoshians had told them the only warp coils they had in store were from this separate alien species that had disappeared from the trade routes for quite some time now, and the coils had been collecting dust on the Frinoshians' ship for the equivalent of the past two Earth years. The Frinoshians had acted more than happy to get rid of them. Now Trip knew why.

Commander Tucker walked over to the communications device on the wall, trying not to notice the colorlessness of the warp engines. They looked drab and lifeless, he noticed. This was not how he liked to see his Engineering Deck.

Tucker pressed the small button on the wall communicator and leaned against the plating, feeling tired. He wanted to go eat something warm and tasty in the mess hall, take a soothing shower, and go to bed. But, no—he had strange, alien warp coils to deal with.

"Tucker to Cap'n," Trip said into the speaker, his Southern accent making his speech slightly rhythmic. Despite this fact, irritation and fatigue crept into his voice.

"Archer here," was the response. Trip thought the captain sounded a little too chipper. Well, he wouldn't be after this announcement.

"I'm having some trouble figuring out these warp coils," Tucker said, hesitantly. He continued just as tentatively. "And I can't read the instructions. Can I get Hoshi down here?" Tucker peered at the strange symbols on the PADD in his hand. "Or an Egyptologist?" There. He'd said it. He needed help installing warp coils.

"Yeah, Hoshi's on her way," Trip heard Archer say. "Commander, how much longer do you think it'll be?"

Tucker rubbed his head. "Cap'n, to be honest, I haven't even started yet."

There was silence on the other end. "Nothing?" was the eventual response.

"Well, I've figured out the warp coils are strange as hell and the instructions are in hieroglyphs!"

"Since the warp coils are so strange are they compatible with our systems?" Archer asked. He had a right to be concerned.

"The Frinoshians said they would be," Trip answered, flinging his arms out in exasperation and feeling smaller and smaller with every word spoken. His ego as a top engineer was suddenly dwindling.

"Is it possible they could've ripped us off?" Archer asked. He was starting to sound annoyed.

"It's possible, Cap'n, but I don't think so. The dimensions seem to fit, but the design is just plain…_strange_." There was really no other word for it.

"All right, Commander, do your best. Hoshi's on her way to help with the translation, and I'll call in for an update in an hour."

Communications were severed.

Trip sighed and walked back to the container of warp coils. If that's what they really _were_. He looked back down at the PADD in his hand and shook his head. If Hoshi could figure this out she was a genius. Words had never come easily to Tucker. Especially those in an alien language. Trip was good with fixing things and working with numbers. That was his field.

The doors behind him swished open and Ensign Hoshi Sato walked in. "Egyptologist?" she asked, amusement on her face. The young Japanese woman clutched her PADD as she said this and walked toward him.

"Uh-huh, Hoshi, this stuff is hieroglyphs!" Tucker insisted. "Look at it—it's crazy!"

"Well, if it were _really _hieroglyphs, we would be able to translate them in a second _and _we would have quite a few questions about how the Kellarians know hieroglyphics." Hoshi smiled at Tucker and laughed at the confusion on his face. "Ok, come on," she said, and she found a spot where she could sit with the PADD and start to make some progress on learning the language of the Kellarians.

Hoshi was becoming increasingly excited as she scanned through the instructions on the PADD. This was her favorite thing to do in the known galaxy. She loved to sit with a new language in front of her and find the patterns, the challenges, the logic. With time, she would find phonemes, and morphemes, tenses, conjugations, syntax—and, hopefully—finally—semantics. The challenge the language presented and the joy that filled her when she could crack the logical linguistic code every known sentient being in the galaxy shared was addicting. Hoshi was glad she was a linguist.

"Ok, this shouldn't be too hard. I have a language on file that I found is very similar to Kellarian—a language that seemed to have branched from the Kellarians. I'll have to look into that more later. But, for now, we have a type of 'Rosetta Stone' with this other language, called Hndrrian, which will help us move faster in deciphering this. Also, I brought this device, which will also help us move faster. This can be finished in an hour and a half, I'd say."

Trip felt relieved at this comment. Since he didn't really have anything better to do than wait for a translation, he looked over Hoshi's shoulder and let her give him a lesson in linguistics.

"I'm not very good at words," Trip said to her, feeling the need to emphasize why he wouldn't be able to help at all. "I'm much better at numbers."

Hoshi looked up at him, a sparkle in her eye and a smile teasing the corners of her mouth. "This has to do a lot more with logical patterns than words, anyway, so this shouldn't be so difficult."

Trip held up his hands, blasé. "I'm just sayin'," he said.

Despite his frustration and fatigue, Trip started to get a bit interested in what Hoshi was doing. The complexity of her work was astounding to Trip. Finding a pattern in a bunch of squiggles and getting a meaning out of them in an hour and a half was astonishing to Commander Tucker. He would much rather fix a hazardous and technical plasma leak than translate Spanish into English, much less some alien language. Regardless of this, he was still very fascinated in how Hoshi was going to do this. And he had front row seats.

"So, once we find a pattern—and here I'm going to use this document in Hndrrian and have the computer match up all the similarities—we can begin studying some of the morphology. It's different in Hndrrian than in Kellarian, so we're going to have to work the morphology through," Hoshi contentedly ran the similarity check on her PADD.

"Morph-who?" Tucker asked. The word had turned to mush in his brain.

Hoshi smiled. " 'Morphology'—we can find patterns in short, distinct symbols that create meaning. This is our first step to deciphering the semantics: the meaning."

"Alright," Trip said, game about this. He was starting to see the fascination in something like linguistics. While it was still beyond him, there was something exciting about it—something like playing one of those old sudoku games. Once you found a pattern you would be trapped in a whirlwind of solving until you got to the end, content. Trip was starting to like this.

"See, here," Hoshi said after a moment of doing some comparing from her PADD to Trip's PADD and pointing to a straight line covering a swirl. "The angle of this line seems to create the past-tense morpheme. The swirl is the same in Hndrrian—it means 'to build'. So, this is saying—"

" 'Built'," Trip said, finishing the thought. All of a sudden he felt proud of himself, like he had just read a sentence in Vulcan, or cracked a code.

"Yes!" Hoshi said, just as pleased with her pupil. "Good! Now that we have that information," here, Hoshi started to input new information into Trip's PADD, "we can figure out other tense markings."

Thirty minutes went by with Hoshi working quickly. Soon she had found the markings for nearly every tense. "It seems the Kellarians don't have the conditional form, like the Hndrrians do," she said. "That's interesting…" the Asian woman muttered to herself.

"What does that mean?" Trip asked, confused.

"Oh, it only means they don't say things like 'I would go' or 'you would be' in their language."

"Now, isn't that grammatically incorrect?" Trip asked. Grammar had been really pushed on him in school and he thought this tense was required in all languages. Of course, he hadn't really thought about it.

"Oh, not at all!" Hoshi said. "Just because someone _says _people are supposed to speak a certain way doesn't mean they're not communicating if they don't use 'perfect grammar'. Linguists try to get meaning out of a sentence, we don't try and see if the person spoke like someone told them too. In linguistics it doesn't matter if someone says 'y'all' or 'you all' as long as they're getting their point across."

"Good," Trip said. He had been known to say "y'all" from time to time.

Hoshi Sato continued to work, finding all the morphological tools: the articles, the conjugations, the plural markings, etc. Once she had those figured out, it was all about matching as many base words to the morphemes from Hndrrian as she could.

Peering over her shoulder again after some time, Trip started to see some progress. "We have words!" Tucker exclaimed, getting more and more excited. Even though he wasn't contributing much to the translating, he was becoming very good at being part of the cheering squad whenever something matched up.

"We have words," Hoshi repeated, getting more and more excited, herself. "Now we have to work on the syntax. This should be easy," Hoshi said, settling down for more puzzling.

After a couple minutes, Hoshi resurfaced from her concentration and said, almost to herself "The Kellarians' syntax seems to work in an SOV order."

"What's SOV?" Trip asked.

"Subject, object, verb," she replied. Then, the young linguist warmed to the subject. "So, in Kellarian, you would say something like 'I the ball throw' instead of 'I throw the ball'."

"That's funny," Tucker said. "It sounds weird."

Hoshi smiled again. "It's actually the most common word order in Earth languages," she said. Tucker whistled in astonishment. He had no idea.

"Ok," he said, game again, getting antsy. "I the warp coils install now?"

Hoshi laughed at the cleverly asked question. "Almost," she replied.

Just then, the intercom sounded. "Captain Archer to Commander Tucker." Trip walked up to the wall unit and pressed the button.

"Trip here," he replied.

"How much longer?" Hoshi had been working at it for nearly an hour already, Tucker noticed, surprised.

Trip looked over at a busily translating Hoshi for an answer. She looked up. "Ten minutes," she replied.

"Ten minutes, Cap'n," Tucker said into the speaker. "And we'll have the instructions finished."

"Ok, keep me updated," Archer said. "Archer out."

Trip walked back to Hoshi, looked over her shoulders, and strolled over to the odd warp coils. He didn't want to crowd Hoshi while she was working so hard, but he didn't want to just stand around doing nothing. Maybe something would click if he stared at the warp coils longer…

Eight minutes later, Hoshi announced she had figured it out.

"I have a basic translation of the Kellarian instructions, but it might not flow very well. It's hard to get a perfect translation in this amount of time and with the little amount of data we have. Maybe someday the universal translator will be able to do all this work for me. Of course, then, I'd be out of a job! I hope this works." She handed the PADD to Trip.

Tucker scanned over the words, deeming it suitable for his need. Hoshi had finished the translation in a little over an hour. "This is great. Thank you, Hoshi. Couldn't have done it without you."

Hoshi smiled at the praise. "Well, I didn't do it _all _by myself. Luckily I can use technology that can make translating alien languages go much smoother," she said, modestly covering up her achievement. "I'll get back to the bridge and tell Captain Archer the translation's done."

Hoshi started to walk away.

"Oh, and, Hoshi?" Trip said, getting her attention before she could leave.

Hoshi turned around, her black hair catching the light.

"Thanks for the linguistics lesson," he said, and smiled.

She laughed. "No problem, Commander," she said, and turned to head back to the bridge.

Trip smiled gratefully at her and walked over to the container holding the warp coils. He looked at the PADD in his hand and read the first sentence aloud to himself. It was a little awkward, but he understood the basic meaning. Then he looked back up at the coils.

"Oh, so that's how you do it!" he exclaimed to no one in particular. "Who would've thought?" He shook his head in wonder.

Hoshi had just turned this nightmare into a piece of cake.

After about twenty-five minutes of reading the translated instructions and tooling around with the new warp coils, Trip was starting to get the hang of it.

~/~/~/~/~/~

Two hours later, Trip found himself in his quarters, full from a delicious dinner and clean from his shower. Now he was warm and cozy in his bed, gratefully letting sleep take over. Thinking back on the events of the day, he was glad there was a talented linguist on board, and, even though it wasn't his passion, he was a bit more interested in linguistics after his little lesson. But, for now, Trip was just glad he and his team could have the warp coils installed and the warp drive up and running within the next few days. With this thought, Trip fell into a blissful sleep.

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_Hope you enjoyed! __**PLEASE REVIEW! **__If you liked this story you might like some of my others, so check them out on my profile page (I've written other _Star Trek _stories as well!). Thanks for reading! :)_


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